The perception that invasive surveillance is confined
only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the
bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power
or even cheers it on.

But that view radically misunderstands what goals
drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes
of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent
behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge.

It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being
placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views
and activism –

In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was
first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced
that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under
surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks.

Lacking
documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing
journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI
branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of
documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political
groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups.

The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things,
attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so
that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.

Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee,
which concluded: “[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a
sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the
exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the
theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the
propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and
deter violence.”

These incidents were not aberrations of the era.

During the Bush
years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of
Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“.

The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting
information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”.

The
evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at
those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort,
since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as
wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents
as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly
proven irresistible.

In the past decade, the government, in an echo of
Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental
activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war
activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights.

Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views.

Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly
underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring
the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas
and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.***The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a
member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots.

Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one
of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and
“online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex
chats with women who are not their wives.

The agency discusses ways to
exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.

The NSA’s treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of
people known as “hacktivists”, is especially troubling and extreme.
That’s because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a
loosely organised affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes
affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold.

Worse
still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the
use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of
the internet, but can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals.

That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening.

People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature
of that series of events is that the United States government looks at
people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, “threats.”
That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat.

***

There has already been reporting that shows that—the
document, for example, in the book that shows the NSA plotting about how
to use information that it collected against people it considers,
quote, “radicalizers.”

These are people the NSA itself
says are not terrorists, do not belong to terrorist organizations, do
not plan terrorist attacks. They simply express ideas the NSA considers radical.

The NSA has collected their online sexual activity, chats of a sexual
nature that they’ve had, pornographic websites that they visit, and
plans, in the document, on how to use this information publicly to
destroy the reputations or credibility of those people to render them
ineffective as advocates.

There are other documents showing the monitoring of who visits the WikiLeaks website
and the collection of data that can identify who they are. There’s
information about how to use deception to undermine people who are
affiliated with the online activism group Anonymous.

Specifically, the trial judge
in the lawsuit challenging the law had asked the government attorneys 5 times
whether journalists like Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges
could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys.

The government refusedto promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

No matter what the Obama administration may say to the
contrary, actions speak louder than words, and history shows that the
U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own
purposes.

What the NDAA does is open the door for the government to
detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker.

According to government guidelines for identifying domestic
extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists, that technically
applies to anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government.

(And former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew
Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain
prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.)

Here's what We The People can do:2014: Time to elect Constitutional Independent Representatives.Regards, Richard <Ricardo Carlos> Charles

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voters may better appreciate why we are taking on the responsibility of
the Nevada Libertarian Party nominated Common Sense Fresh Start
Politics of Prosperity Constitutional Campaign for US Representative in
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